virtually speaking - intro and context

The lines between the virtual and the real are increasingly getting blurred, and this blurring is beginning to affect the built environment. This blurring of lines is happening at a time when the world is seriously looking for solutions to prevent a further despoliation of our environment. These two issues are putting special pressures on the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning to:

-find more sustainable processes, methods, and technologies, for practice and design
-figure out how to use the open source nature of digital media (blogs, wikis, etc...) in practice, advocacy, theory, and design
-find a place within virtual reality forums (such as Second Life), as these worlds begin to cross over into reality and affect the built environment

context
Throughout my architectural education I have been interested in emerging digital media. I am less concerned with the CAD/CAM technologies built specially for architects and other related fields, than the connectivity technologies widely available to the public. This of course means, blogger, youtube, myspace, facebook, flickr, archinect, delicious, the fully virtual worlds like Second Life, and many others.

In a previous life, working side by side with Edward Mazria in the non-profit Architecture 2030, we began using digital media and presence to get the 2030 Challenge message out. All this culminated in the 2010 Imperative. An event that reached a quarter of a million design students, educators, and professionals organized by a few passionate individuals with laptops as Susan Szenazy, editor of Metropolis Magazine, wrote on her June 2007 editorial "Calling All Designers".

In 2006 I started a school blog in Archinect, where I continued musing on digital media.
Archinect entries and threads that inspired this project:
-musings on the virtual
-more musings on the virtual
-postopolis! @ archinect
-anti-starchitect chic
-editing wikipedia
-Heather Ring and Bryan Boyer's "Architecture's Second Life" and the subsequent discussion by the larger Archinect community


This blog will explore these, seemingly disconnected and even oxymoronic, issues specifically, while occasionally venturing off into whatever else seems appropriate.

Digital Turbines turn in the virtual wind.